A Geekbench score for the iPhone 14 Pro Max with the new A16 Bionic chip has revealed little performance improvement compared to the iPhone 13 Pro and Pro Max from last year.
A Geekbench test result for iPhone15,3, the identifier for the iPhone 14 Pro Max, shows the new iPhone with a single-core score of 1879 and a multi-core score of 4664. The iPhone 13 Pro scores 1707 in single-core and 4659 in multi-core, only being marginally slower than the latest high-end iPhone.
The most significant new feature of the A16 Bionic chip is that it's the first chip from Apple based on the smaller 4nm process. The A15 Bionic chip, like Apple's M1 and M2 Apple silicon chips for the Mac, is based on the 5nm process.
Despite the smaller jump in performance that some may have hoped, Apple says the A16 Bionic chip is "the fastest chip ever in a smartphone." The A16 Bionic has a more powerful GPU that can provide up to 50% more memory bandwidth for graphics-intensive games. The A16 Bionic also has a new 16-core Neural Engine to power advanced machine learning tasks. In the CPU, the A16 Bionic features the same 6-core count as the A15 Bionic, but Apple says it's a "new 6-core CPU."
Update: This article has been updated to note that the Geekbench result is for an iPhone 14 Pro Max, not an iPhone 14 Pro. Both devices use the same A16 chip, however, so their scores should be similar.
Top Rated Comments
But I think the SoC has reached a point now for Apple where it’s pretty much a solved problem. The issue is unleashing the existing power of what’s already on the market. So software and efficiency is really where it’s at.
Besides 5nm to 4nm, shouldn’t be that surprised. If A17 Bionic goes to 3 NM, might see some dramatic raw performance. But again, who is Apple competing with here? It’s certainly not Android phones, it’s obviously itself.
What a time to live?
Also, we know when it comes to the M3, multi-core performance scales almost linearly by just packing in more cores, so I'm not concerned for Apple Silicon on the Mac.